Joe Hildebrand: Catch and killing their own: the farcical cause senator has been recruited to join

Now that Senator Fatima Payman has quit the Labor Party, the real reason she betrayed the party has been revealed, writes Joe Hildebrand.

And so the rug is pulled back and the great truth exposed.

All the moral posturing about Palestine, all the hand-wringing about Gaza, all the tortured Gothic rhetoric — “Each step felt like a mile…” — was an elaborate ruse.

It was not just an agonised crisis of conscience that forced Fatima Payman to betray Labor and vote with the Greens on a pointless Senate motion about the Middle East.

It was a calculated political move that was seemingly weeks in the making.

Far from just the so-called “genocide” in Gaza driving her to cross the floor it appears it was Payman’s political ambitions that were driving her all along.

We now know that the rookie ex-Labor senator was in discussions with the ultimate political operator Glenn Druery, the so-called “preference whisperer” whose biggest previous claim to fame was getting the Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party elected to the Senate in 2013.

Truth exposed.....Senator Fatima Payman announces her exit from the ALP. Picture: NewsWire/ Martin Ollman

If Druery or the nation’s Motoring Enthusiasts have any history of solidarity with the Palestinian cause I am mysteriously unaware of it. Yet it was with him, by Druery’s own admission, that Payman was consulting amid the furore and, I am told, weeks before.

Moreover Payman has, according to my well-placed source, agreed to front a “Muslim party” — an apparent reference to the nascent Muslim Vote movement that is planning to target Labor MPs in seats with high Islamic populations.

She will apparently use her Senate seat to secure automatic registration for whatever new party emerges and said party will run in both the House of Reps and the Senate.

The only good news is that this has apparently blindsided and panicked the Greens, who thought they would be the beneficiaries of luring Payman to their side and are — I hear — begging Muslim Vote not to run for the Senate and eat into the extreme left party’s vote.

Political strategist Glenn Druery.

What a fine bunch of people all round. It is now abundantly clear that this farcical and nasty parlour room plot has more to do with cold hard transactional politics than it does with high principle.

Because cold hard transactional politics is the only type of politics Druery knows. The formula is as simple as it is cynical. You get as many micro-parties in a room as possible and make them swear on their grandmothers’ graves to all preference each other.

No matter how tiny each party’s vote, as the tiniest gets knocked out their votes flow to the next tiniest and so on until the least tiniest finally gets a quota. Thus Motoring Enthusiast Ricky Muir made it to the Senate with a primary vote of 0.5 per cent, the Steven Bradbury of Australian politics.

And so Druery is like a political poker machine. Most players will lose but if just one wins the jackpot they will be forever in his debt.

Fair enough. If Druery wants to game the system then good luck to him.

Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party senator Ricky Muir. Picture: Paul Jeffers/ The Australian

He would hardly be the first even though various efforts have been made to try to make him the last. Needless to say they have not been entirely successful.

The point is he is not a guy one would typically call on in great moments of moral crisis or geo-political flashpoints.

Many times and in many forms throughout global history the question has been asked: There is unspeakable human suffering occurring before my eyes — who can we possibly turn to?

The answers to such existential laments have typically ranged between “God” and “no one”. I am pretty sure that they have never included the words “Glenn Druery”.

And yet, in the increasingly Pythonesque farce that is Western democracy, here we are.

By turning to such a political operator the “Muslim Vote” movement instantly undermines its own credibility. Why, if there is such a genuine groundswell of outrage, are they dealing with a bloke whose primary cause of conviction is preference flows?

The Payman affair has been a thorn in the side for the PM. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

They have also been dubbed in some quarters the “Muslim Teals”, which seems like an unintended joke. One can only imagine the synergy between them and Teal seats like Wentworth and Kooyong and Goldstein.

But they do have one thing in common with the Teals, and indeed the Greens who are now so terrified of them: They catch and kill their own.

Because the MPs that the Muslim Vote movement is targeting are the most pro-Muslim MPs in the Labor Party. They are the ones who have been most outspoken, sometimes tearfully so, about what is happening in Gaza.

Just like the Teals destroyed the leading moderates in the Liberal Party and sent it further to the Right, and the Greens always knock off Labor’s inner-city left, these guys are trying to get rid of the MPs who are already on their side.

And this is the cause that Fatima Payman has supposedly been recruited to join: A Muslim Labor MP defecting to a Muslim movement dedicated to knocking off the most pro-Muslim Labor MPs.

You honestly couldn’t read about it. But you did. Here.

Get The Real Story with Joe Hildebrand wherever you get your podcasts